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Caltrain's Electric Fleet Exceeds Efficiency Expectations

2025-01-25

Caltrain's Electric Fleet Exceeds Efficiency Expectations

Caltrain announced that regenerative braking on its new electric trains is returning approximately 23% of consumed energy to the grid, exceeding initial projections. This significantly reduces operating costs (from a projected $19.5 million annually to $16.5 million) and earns the agency approximately $6 million annually in energy credits from California's Low Carbon Fuel Standard Program. As the first railroad in a generation to transition from diesel to electric power, Caltrain showcases a model for sustainable public transportation.

(www.caltrain.com)

Tech regenerative braking electric trains sustainable transportation

First Look: Loops, a Fediverse Short-Form Video App

2025-01-25

First Look: Loops, a Fediverse Short-Form Video App

Pixelfed's new short-form video app, Loops, is now in public beta. Similar to TikTok or Instagram Reels, it's built specifically for the Fediverse. Currently in early stages, Loops has limitations including a lack of built-in camera and editor, and a weak search function. However, it boasts a polished and user-friendly interface, with plans to add features like federation, open-source code, and improved discovery. Loops shows promise but needs to address key issues to thrive within the Fediverse ecosystem.

(wedistribute.org)

Tech short-form video

Android SMS Gateway with MQTT: Turn Your Phone into an SMS Hub

2025-01-25

Android SMS Gateway with MQTT: Turn Your Phone into an SMS Hub

This project transforms your Android phone into a powerful SMS gateway using the MQTT protocol. It allows sending and receiving SMS messages, forwarding them to a server, and sending sent/delivered notifications. Features include USSD request support, multiple SIM card support, and retry mechanisms for failed SMS delivery. While compatibility for some features (like USSD and multiple SIM cards) depends on your phone and carrier, the project provides the full source code, enabling developers to compile and modify it to suit their needs.

(github.com)

Development SMS Gateway

EA Origin Shutdown: Secure Your Games!

2025-01-25

EA Origin Shutdown: Secure Your Games!

EA is shutting down its Origin platform on April 17, 2025. All Origin users must migrate to the EA app to keep playing and preserve their game data. While the transition is relatively straightforward, it requires a 64-bit system, potentially necessitating an upgrade for some users. Alternatively, players can add their games to their Steam library to avoid using the EA app entirely.

(www.pcworld.com)

Game

The Secret Experiment: Identical Triplets and the Nature vs. Nurture Debate

2025-01-25

The Secret Experiment: Identical Triplets and the Nature vs. Nurture Debate

In 1980, three identical triplets, separated at birth and adopted into different families, unexpectedly reunited. Their story, however, wasn't a heartwarming tale of chance encounters. It revealed a sinister secret: they were unwitting participants in a clandestine psychological experiment designed to unravel the nature versus nurture debate. Researchers, seeking to understand the impact of genetics and environment on behavior, secretly observed the triplets' lives for years. The experiment, however, caused significant emotional distress, with one triplet tragically taking his own life. The ethical implications of this secret study sparked outrage and continue to raise serious questions about the boundaries of scientific research.

(historicflix.com)

Misc psychology experiment identical triplets nature vs. nurture

TinyZero: Unlocking Reasoning in LLMs on a Budget

2025-01-25

TinyZero: Unlocking Reasoning in LLMs on a Budget

TinyZero is a project demonstrating how to imbue large language models (LLMs) with self-verification and search capabilities at low cost, using reinforcement learning. Built upon veRL and experimenting with the Qwen2.5 series, TinyZero provides detailed instructions for installation, data preparation, and training. Even smaller models can achieve sophisticated reasoning. The project showcases the feasibility of enhancing LLMs via RL, offering a new approach to cost-effective AI research.

(github.com)

AI Low-cost AI

Pentagon's AI Arms Race: Silicon Valley's Deadly Allure

2025-01-25

Pentagon's AI Arms Race: Silicon Valley's Deadly Allure

The Pentagon's 'Replicator' initiative is rapidly developing AI weapons, raising concerns due to its opaque operational model. The program aims to quickly produce low-cost, expendable weapon systems, targeting China. While the Pentagon claims it's not developing 'killer robots', its collaboration with Silicon Valley tech firms and statements from some contractors hint at a potentially lethal outcome. The article urges the Pentagon to clarify its AI weapons' intended use and establish safeguards, preventing a global arms race and ethical risks.

(www.citizen.org)

Tech arms race Pentagon

Deep Dive into Cloud Virtualization: Red Hat, AWS Firecracker, and Ubicloud Internals

2025-01-24

Deep Dive into Cloud Virtualization: Red Hat, AWS Firecracker, and Ubicloud Internals

This blog post delves into the core architectures of cloud virtualization, using Red Hat, AWS Firecracker, and Ubicloud as case studies to compare their differences in virtual machine monitors (VMMs), kernel virtualization, and resource isolation. It explains the roles of key components like KVM, QEMU, and libvirt, and analyzes the use of technologies such as cgroups, nftables, and seccomp-bpf in achieving resource and security isolation. The author also contrasts the AWS Nitro system, summarizing the evolution of cloud virtualization technology and the importance of open-source technology in this field.

(www.ubicloud.com)

Tech cloud virtualization security isolation

Chicago Casino's Minority-Only Stock Offering: A Risky Gamble?

2025-01-24

Chicago Casino's Minority-Only Stock Offering: A Risky Gamble?

Bally's, a Chicago casino, launched a controversial stock offering exclusively for women and minorities meeting specific criteria. This raises concerns about legality, market valuation, and potential exploitation of lower-income investors. The article delves into the complex capital structure, revealing high leverage, high risk, and potential tax pitfalls. It questions whether this empowers minority communities or serves as a political maneuver to secure a casino license, highlighting the questionable valuation and the potential for predatory lending practices disguised as 'generational wealth' creation.

(www.bitsaboutmoney.com)

Startup Finance Investment Minority

From Neovim to Zed: A 15-Year Vim Veteran's Editor Migration

2025-01-24

A seasoned developer, after 15 years with Vim/Neovim, switched to the new editor Zed due to frustration with complex configurations and plugin management, and a desire for native LLM integration. Zed's solid Vim mode, simple JSON configuration, powerful LLM integration (called "Assistant"), and blazing-fast speed impressed him, prompting a temporary farewell to his long-time companion, Neovim. While it's an experiment, his initial impressions are positive, hinting at a possible new era for code editors.

(sgoel.dev)

Development

Automating Responses to Real Estate Spam with LLMs

2025-01-24

The author built a system using LLMs to automatically respond to spam text messages from real estate brokers. The system involves modifying the Android-SMS-Gateway-MQTT app for bidirectional MQTT communication. A Python script listens for incoming texts via MQTT, uses an LLM to generate responses based on pre-defined personalities, and stores conversation context for coherence. Ollama is used for convenient experimentation and personality adjustments. The author shares screenshots of amusing interactions but also notes legal and security considerations.

(evan.widloski.com)

Development

GitHub's UI: Past, Present, and a 10x Frontend Cost

2025-01-24

This is a retrospective by GitHub engineer Joel Hawksley on the evolution of GitHub's UI architecture. He recounts GitHub's journey from simpler beginnings to its current focus on usability and accessibility, highlighting the challenges encountered along the way. He emphasizes that mobile is the new baseline, and building and maintaining design systems (like Primer) comes with unforeseen costs, with frontend code complexity being 10 times that of backend. Hawksley advises developers to avoid reinventing the wheel, leverage existing design systems, and carefully budget for frontend complexity to reduce costs and improve efficiency.

(hawksley.org)

Development UI Architecture

Lessons Learned Scaling WebSockets at Compose

2025-01-24

Compose shares its hard-won wisdom on scaling WebSockets. The article highlights crucial strategies for graceful deployments, establishing a consistent message schema, detecting silent disconnects with heartbeats, and using HTTP as a fallback. These techniques enabled Compose to achieve near-zero downtime for its WebSocket service, ensuring real-time performance and application reliability.

(composehq.com)

Development High Availability

Simplified Chernobyl Analysis: Unveiling Design Flaws in the RBMK Reactor

2025-01-24

This paper uses simplified numerical models to analyze the Chernobyl accident. The study reveals that the accident was closely related to design flaws in the RBMK reactor. Its large size and weak power negative feedback coefficient made reactor power difficult to control, even with an automatic system, leading to easily triggered xenon oscillations. The safety rod design, when the upper half of the core experienced xenon poisoning, initially increased core reactivity. This resulted in a high-pressure increase, a strong shock wave in the fuel channels, and the destruction of pressure tubes. The subsequent depressurization (flash evaporation) further exacerbated the accident. The study also evaluates the fission energy released during the accident and discusses the reactor's stability and control strategies.

(www.epj-n.org)

Tech Chernobyl RBMK reactor nuclear accident

Physics Uncovers Critical Tipping Points in Chess Matches

2025-01-24

Physics Uncovers Critical Tipping Points in Chess Matches

Physicist Marc Barthelemy analyzed over 20,000 top-level chess games using interaction graphs to reveal crucial tipping points. Treating chess as a complex system, he measured the 'betweenness centrality' and 'fragility scores' of chess pieces to predict game outcomes. The fragility score of key pieces rises about eight moves before a critical turning point and remains high for approximately 15 moves afterward, revealing a universal pattern across players and openings. This research offers fresh insights into the complex dynamics of chess and provides new avenues for AI and machine learning.

(arstechnica.com)

AI

Steve Reich's Clapping Music, Reimagined with Flip-Disc Displays

2025-01-24

Steve Reich's Clapping Music, Reimagined with Flip-Disc Displays

An artist ingeniously recreates Steve Reich's iconic 'Clapping Music' using two flip-disc displays. By controlling the flipping of individual segments, they produce a rhythmic sound reminiscent of clapping. The project showcases a blend of hardware and software, demonstrating a unique artistic approach to sound and visuals. The code is open-source, inviting others to experiment and build upon the work.

(hannahilea.com)

Hardware Creative

Sophisticated Phishing Attempt: Almost Pwned

2025-01-24

Sophisticated Phishing Attempt: Almost Pwned

This detailed account describes a sophisticated phishing attack where the perpetrator impersonated a Google employee, using phone calls and emails to trick the author into resetting their account. Exploiting a vulnerability in Google Workspace and leveraging the g.co domain, the attacker convincingly mimicked Google support, nearly succeeding. The author ultimately uncovered the scam and shares their experience as a cautionary tale, highlighting the importance of cybersecurity awareness and vigilance against advanced phishing techniques.

(gist.github.com)

Tech

Simplifying a Haskell Backend with GADTs: A Tale of Two Lambda Box Targets

2025-01-24

Simplifying a Haskell Backend with GADTs: A Tale of Two Lambda Box Targets

This blog post details how the author used Generalized Algebraic Datatypes (GADTs) in Haskell to simplify the development of an Agda compiler backend. Facing the challenge of compiling to two different Lambda Box intermediate language targets (typed and untyped), the author leveraged GADTs and dependent types to elegantly avoid code duplication and enforce type safety. The type system prevents the omission of type information for the typed target. This practical example demonstrates the power of GADTs in everyday programming and showcases how dependent types can help prevent errors, resulting in cleaner, more maintainable code.

(acatalepsie.fr)

Development Dependent Types

Netflix's Cloud Gaming Push: Co-op and Party Games on the Way

2025-01-24

Netflix's Cloud Gaming Push: Co-op and Party Games on the Way

Netflix is expanding its cloud gaming efforts, planning to launch a service featuring co-op and party games streamed directly to TVs. Co-CEO Greg Peters described this as a successor to family board game nights or an evolution of TV game shows. While a release date hasn't been announced, Netflix has been beta testing cloud gaming since 2023 and plans to continue investment. The company will also focus on narrative games based on Netflix IP.

(www.theverge.com)

Game multiplayer games

UK Adults with ADHD Experience 6-9 Year Life Expectancy Reduction

2025-01-24

A matched cohort study using UK primary care data reveals a significant life expectancy deficit for adults diagnosed with ADHD. Analyzing data from over 9.5 million individuals across 792 general practices between 2000 and 2019, researchers found a reduction of 6.78 years for men and 8.64 years for women compared to the general population. This shortened lifespan is likely attributed to modifiable risk factors and unmet support needs for both ADHD and co-occurring mental and physical health conditions. The findings highlight a critical unmet need for improved support and treatment for adults with ADHD.

(www.cambridge.org)

Tech Life Expectancy Mortality

PhysicsForums: How AI-Generated Posts Are Killing the Internet?

2025-01-24

An investigative article exposes the widespread falsification of user posts on PhysicsForums, a scientific community founded in 2001, with AI-generated content retroactively added to the site. This microcosm highlights the 'Dead Internet Theory' – the idea that much of the internet isn't human-created. The article analyzes how AI-generated content undermines the authenticity of the forum and the compromises websites make for survival, prompting reflections on the future of the internet and human-computer interaction. The authors examine the ethical implications of using LLMs to generate content under the guise of existing users, blurring the lines between human and machine-generated information.

(hallofdreams.org)

Tech

OpenAI's Operator: The End of the Open Web?

2025-01-25

OpenAI's Operator: The End of the Open Web?

OpenAI's new AI agent, Operator, browses the web for you, potentially signaling the end of the open internet as we know it. Tools like Operator change how we access information; we go directly to the AI, bypassing intermediaries like Google and TripAdvisor. This threatens the ad-revenue models of these websites, potentially leading to their decline. The future may involve a structured data layer where middlemen sell data to AI companies. This raises concerns about the sources of high-quality user data and the future of the open web itself.

(brids.bearblog.dev)

Tech Open Web Information Access

Chatbox: Your AI Desktop Copilot

2025-01-25

Chatbox: Your AI Desktop Copilot

Chatbox is an open-source desktop client application supporting various Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT, Claude, Gemini, and Ollama. Key features include local data storage, cross-platform compatibility, advanced prompting capabilities, and team collaboration. Initially created for prompt debugging, its ease of use and functionality led to widespread adoption, transforming it into a robust AI desktop application used for everything from prompt debugging to casual chatting.

(github.com)

Development AI application desktop client

Helix Editor Gets a File Explorer

2025-01-25

Helix Editor Gets a File Explorer

A significant update has landed in the Helix editor! Developer drybalka has integrated a file explorer with minimal code changes. This file explorer functions similarly to the Telescope file browser but cleverly leverages Helix's existing file picker, modifying only a few core files. The result is a substantial improvement in user experience, providing a much-needed file browsing capability. While currently basic, it addresses a long-standing user request and significantly enhances Helix's usability.

(github.com)

Development File Explorer Code Editor

YouTube's Hour-Long Unskippable Ads Spark User Outrage

2025-01-25

YouTube's Hour-Long Unskippable Ads Spark User Outrage

YouTube users are reporting outrageously long unskippable ads, some lasting up to an hour. Many suspect ad blockers are the culprit, potentially interfering with the 'skip' button functionality. Google responded, stating that ad blockers violate YouTube's Terms of Service and are encouraging users to allow ads or subscribe to YouTube Premium. While Google denies intentionally serving these excessively long ads, the incident highlights the ongoing tension between monetizing content and maintaining a positive user experience, sparking a wider conversation about ad length and the effectiveness of ad blockers.

(www.androidauthority.com)

Tech YouTube Ads Ad Blockers

Type Predicate Generator: Speed and Type Safety Redefined

2025-01-24

Type Predicate Generator: Speed and Type Safety Redefined

This article delves into a comprehensive comparison of Type-Predicate-Generator against other runtime type checkers. Generator produces code that's over 100 times faster, boasts zero runtime dependencies, and generates strictly type-safe, readable, and modifiable TypeScript code without requiring a custom DSL. It outperforms other code generators in speed, even emitting unit tests, while avoiding `eval()` and providing a superior debugging experience. In short, Generator offers significant advantages in performance, type safety, and ease of use.

(github.com)

Development type checking

Deconstructing Fenwick Trees with Functional Programming

2025-01-25

This paper delves into the implementation of Fenwick trees (also known as binary indexed trees). Starting with the more readily understandable segment tree, the author uses functional programming and equational reasoning to derive the implementation of Fenwick trees, revealing the logic behind their seemingly mysterious bitwise operations. By cleverly using a Haskell EDSL to operate on infinite two's complement binary numbers, the paper ultimately explains the secret of Fenwick trees' efficient implementation and proves the logarithmic time complexity of its update and range query operations.

(www.cambridge.org)

Development Fenwick tree segment tree

Visualizing Your Python Project's Dependency Graph with Tach

2025-01-25

This article demonstrates how to visualize your Python project's dependency graph using the Tach tool. In just a few steps—installing Tach, defining module boundaries, syncing dependencies, and viewing the dependency graph—developers gain a clear understanding of project structure and inter-module dependencies. This facilitates code refactoring, improves code quality, and helps avoid circular dependencies. Tach also allows enforcing module boundaries and defining strict interfaces, leading to cleaner, more maintainable projects.

(www.gauge.sh)

Development Dependency Graph

North Korean Hackers Extort US Companies After Stealing Source Code

2025-01-24

North Korean Hackers Extort US Companies After Stealing Source Code

The FBI issued a warning about North Korean hackers posing as IT workers to infiltrate US companies, steal source code, and extort ransoms. These hackers use various methods, including AI face-swapping technology, to conceal their identities. After gaining access, they copy code to personal accounts and threaten to leak information for ransom. The FBI advises companies to strengthen hiring processes, limit permissions, and monitor network traffic to prevent such attacks. A joint statement from the US, South Korea, and Japan revealed that North Korean state-sponsored hacking groups stole over $659 million in cryptocurrency in 2024.

(www.bleepingcomputer.com)

Tech North Korean Hackers

KubeStatus Operator: Easily Add a Status Page to Your Kubernetes Cluster

2025-01-24

KubeStatus Operator: Easily Add a Status Page to Your Kubernetes Cluster

KubeStatus Operator is a free and open-source tool that easily adds a status page to your Kubernetes cluster, displaying the operational status (operational, degraded, or DOWN) of services. Written in Go and utilizing the Kubernetes API to fetch cluster and resource information, KubeStatus provides a simple and convenient way to view the current state of your cluster and resources without needing the kubectl command-line tool or the Kubernetes dashboard. It also offers a user-friendly page that can serve as your main status page.

(github.com)

Development Status Monitoring Open Source Tool

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